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The Iraqi film “The President’s Cake” is a great new entry in the vital cinematic tradition exemplified by Italian neorealism. At and after the end of the Second World War, Italian filmmakers responded with a new freedom to the traumas of Fascism and German Occupation as well as to the crises of American intervention amid Italy’s efforts to rebuild physically, politically, and morally. “The President’s Cake,” written and directed by Hasan Hadi, is one of the few recent films I’ve seen that fulfills a similar mission in a country similarly devastated by autocracy and war. Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Like many of the essential neorealist films (such as “Paisan” and “Shoeshine”), “The President’s Cake” is intently focussed on catastrophic poverty issuing from war. It’s centered on the plights of children unmoored from overwhelmed or absent families, and it’s keenly attentive to the emotional and practical havoc wrought by a ruthless dictator. The movie is set in the span of a few days, in April, 1990, a period that Hadi appears to treat as a composite, folding in the harrowing results of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, in August of that year, which prompted U.N.-imposed sanctions and U.S.-led bombing raids. Even in the best of times, the film’s main characters weren’t prosperous. The protagonist is a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who lives with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), in a mudhif, a house of twisted reeds, in Iraq’s southern marshlands. Lamia is an exceptional student, top of the class, but to get to school she, like many others in the region, must punt across a marsh. Some kids are ferried by a parent or guardian; Lamia transports herself.

Her grandma (Bibi, in Iraqi Arabic) is a farm worker who, on the morning of April 26th, two days before President Saddam Hussein’s birthday, is abruptly fired—involuntarily retired—by the landlord whose property she tills. She and Lamia thus turn instantly from poor to destitute. The timing couldn’t be worse, because, later that very day, Lamia is randomly chosen in school for a great honor that’s also a grave responsibility: to bake a birthday cake for Hussein, as is done in all schools throughout the country. Bibi can’t afford even the basic ingredients—eggs, flour, sugar, baking powder—but failure to bring the cake would be a severely punishable political offense. So, the next day, Bibi packs salable possessions—a radio, a pocket watch, some plates, some tchotchkes—and, with Lamia (and the girl’s pet rooster) in tow, hitches a ride with a postman named Jasim (Rahim AlHaj) to a nearby city, where they make the rounds of street merchants and try to come up with the money.

In the city, the story splits in half: Lamia gets separated from Bibi (for reasons I wouldn’t dare disclose) and searches for the one person she knows there, a classmate’s father, who supposedly works at an amusement park. At the venue, she espies the classmate, a boy named Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), picking someone’s pocket. When the police give chase, Lamia runs off with him. The rest of the film is a classic double adventure—Lamia and Saeed, now a team, take perilous risks to procure the needed ingredients for the cake, while Bibi desperately looks for Lamia.

Throughout, Hadi calls attention to the brutality that’s endemic in Iraqi daily life under a dictatorship. The ubiquitous portraits of Hussein—in classrooms and offices, in restaurants and stores, as freestanding steles and on public murals—match the reign of terror that he conducts. When Saeed visits Lamia at home, he wonders whether the President actually eats all the cakes, and Lamia hushes him: “Walls have ears.” The children’s classroom is run by a teacher who declares himself a soldier; each school day begins with the students’ mandatory fervent martial pledge to sacrifice body and soul for Hussein, and the teacher reminds the class that another classmate, who failed to honor the President’s birthday, was “dragged like a dog” along with his family.

But the most prominent form of daily brutality is economic deprivation, owing in large measure to the U.N. sanctions. The movie opens with marshland residents, including Lamia and Bibi, lining up far back and pressing urgently forward, jerricans in hand, to receive fresh water at a tanker truck from officials offering it as a gift from Hussein. Later, in the city, people similarly crowd into a store, waving bills frantically as if at an auction, as they clamor for flour. Taking advantage of such desperation, the more fortunate become predators: male merchants use food as lures for sex—even targeting Lamia. Navigating the city alone, she is forced into risky survivalism, perilously hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a bus for which she can’t afford the fare. Though revolted by theft, she ends up stealing. The country runs on bribes, whether at an imposing military checkpoint, at a police station, or at a hospital (even though, in the scene in question, the needed medicine is unavailable because of sanctions).

It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper. When things go sour, both kids spew insults and indignation with a matter-of-fact insolence. At moments of exceptional gravity, they play a staring contest that fills the screen with an ingenuous romanticism. The bonds of the children, Bibi, the postman, and a very few others in their circle endow “The President’s Cake” with a grandly humanistic warmth that’s all the stronger for the mighty pressure under which it’s forged.

What carries the drama toward sublimity, though, is Hadi’s way with the physical world and his characters’ place in it. His camera eye (thanks to cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru) is avidly alert to texture and makes visual patterns seem urgently tactile. In this regard, Hadi’s film reminds me of masterworks of the American director Joseph Losey (such as “Eva”and “These Are the Damned”), in which material surroundings rivalled behavior in expressing characters’ inner lives. “The President’s Cake” is adorned, embossed, scarred, and exalted with what gives daily life its literal feelings. The curves and twists of the reeds with which Lamia’s and Saeed’s homes are made; the angularities of modernist concrete walkways; the raw edges of bricks in the walls of a long alley; the rich jumble of foods that fill teeming markets; an arcades’ graceful arches; the exacting tile work on a mosque—all carry the mark of labor, forethought, and love. Hadi’s exceptional attention gives cinematic identity to collective artisanal energy, to the life force of care and devotion that stands outside the agonies of politics, to the spirit that endures a regime and outlives it. ♦

In April of 2023, when I was fresh out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, I was hired as the nonfiction critic at the newly revived books section of the Washington Post. The shock to my system was immediate. In graduate school, where I studied aesthetics and German philosophy, I seldom came into contact with anyone who did anything else; even a brush with a classicist or the occasional stray Cartesian felt like something of a transgression. But the Post, it turned out, was much less siloed than the university. On my first day, I discovered that Books was seated next to Food. I broke a sweat scrambling eggs, and here, next to me, was a woman explaining patiently over the phone, “You don’t need to tell the readers which kind of chicken breast to use. They can choose organic if they want to.” A couple of days later, I overheard a heated discussion about salting pasta water. I hadn’t known that I cared about salting pasta water, but, in the course of my prurient listening, I found that I did, or at least that I cared that other people cared.

I like to think that some of the readers of my late section, Book World, made the same sort of leap. Maybe they hadn’t expected to be waylaid by a book review when they opened the paper to read about Donald Trump’s latest indiscretion or to check the score of a Capitals game; maybe they didn’t seek out literary criticism because they didn’t realize they liked it, or didn’t even know what it was. But they subscribed to a general-interest newspaper, so they happened upon its books coverage occasionally—and, sometimes, they stopped to read it.

In the three years that I worked at the Post, I fielded mail from all manner of people—doctors, teachers, prison inmates, and, not infrequently, Ralph Nader—about reviews I had written of everything from Senator Josh Hawley’s book about masculinity to the letters of Gustave Flaubert. Readers wrote from the D.C. suburbs and the Netherlands, from Arizona and New York. What they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare and precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed.

From now on, the Post will no longer accommodate the admirably omnivorous avidity of its best readers. Visitors to its home page will no longer come across unforeseen book reviews, or really much writing about the arts at all. Last week, the paper fired close to half of the staff who remained after a previous round of layoffs, gutting its local and international desks, decimating its sports and arts coverage, and eliminating Book World altogether. No one who has anything to do with books remains employed at the paper, although I am told that the opinion section (exhorted last year to cheerlead for “personal liberties and free markets,” and Trumpism along with them) will run the occasional facsimile of a review. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews last fall; the Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing.

There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.

Unlike the specialized literary magazine and its informal cousin, the literary blog, the general-interest newspaper has a kind of noble rapacity, an encyclopedic ambition to wrap its arms around the whole of the world. The Times insists that it strains to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” and the Washington Post’s own principles, written by Eugene Meyer in 1935, when he became the paper’s publisher, proclaim that it “shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.” (They also promise that “the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good,” something that the paper’s present owner appears to have forgotten, if he ever knew it.) Whether the Times and the Post live up to their own standards in any given instance, or whether any newspaper can, there is an important difference between the completist ideal and a niche one, between “ALL the truth” and the truncated truth that a reader has already demonstrated she is willing to pay for—or, worse, the thin sliver of half-truth that her algorithm feeds her, mirroring her own existing tastes in a dismal mise en abyme.

A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.

It is true, of course, that the public is only a useful fiction. No one has ever seen one in the wild. Some readers refuse to join one, stubbornly persisting in flipping to one section and ignoring the rest. But even if no newspaper can succeed entirely in cultivating the public that it imagines, it can still succeed to a greater or lesser degree—and Book World did succeed. Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, in 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.” Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

But to defend books coverage in these craven terms is already to concede too much. Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preëxisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise.

In his own robotic recitation over the weekend, Bezos explained his logic for the cuts, such as it is. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,” he said. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of Bezos’s other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all? ♦

When I began this series of columns about religion and politics, I did not set out to proselytize on behalf of a specific set of beliefs, especially not ones of any spiritual variety. But I did hope to get at why we, as Americans, seem to have such a hard time these days coming to a moral consensus.

I have found myself circling one question: In today’s atomized digital world, is there a way for a community of faith to grow, not simply as individuals who identify as part of a religious group but truly as a community? Take, for example, a pastor who goes on TikTok and Instagram to build a following. You could argue that this is good for their church because they’re getting out the good word and meeting young people where they live, so to speak. But will that form of sermonizing create an actual community, or will it simply inspire individuals to believe in their own personal way?

The moral future of the U.S. does not rely on religious unanimity, of course. But I believe that for progressive ideas to have any shot of fulfillment, they must be connected to the church, much as they were during the civil-rights movement. (Today, faith organizations still work on humanitarian causes—as I’ve noted repeatedly, immigration and homelessness services are largely provided by Catholic charities—but they tend to perform that work quietly.) However, we have become so lonely, and spend so much time staring at our phones, and it sometimes feels impossible for anything—religion, art, recreation—to avoid being swallowed up by the gospel of personal optimization.

Thinking about this problem led me to Ron Purser, a Buddhist teacher, a professor at San Francisco State University, and the author of “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.” Mindfulness was once touted by the Vietnamese monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh as a way to understand the “interbeing” between all forms of life; in one respect, the spread of the idea is a remarkable example of a religious concept taking hold in twenty-first-century American life.

But Purser’s book is a combative and compelling critique of everything that’s wrong with contemporary mindfulness as practiced in corporate H.R. departments, schools, and the military. “Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training,” Purser writes. “Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.”

This monomaniacal and thoroughly individualized focus turned mindfulness into yet another personalized optimization ritual. You can detach your way into a state of intense dispassion for the suffering of other people; you can meditate yourself into callous vanity and mistake “personal growth” for enlightenment. Purser’s critique operates at two levels: he believes McMindfulness is a purposeful corporate intervention that manages the stress levels of workers and teaches them to not care about what’s happening outside the office. This co-opting has been aided by a hack social science—“happiness studies” and the like—that confer authority upon supposed experts in mindfulness, who then build media empires around coaching management types on how to ignore their neighbors in a gentle way.

What Purser preaches, instead, is “social mindfulness,” which he believes can allow people to see just how atomized and alienated we have all become from one another. I talked to him about how things went wrong and whether it’s possible, at this point, for them to go right. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that mindfulness has been stripped of its ethical teachings and of the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self. How did the idea go from something countercultural and deeply philosophical to the thing you get a pamphlet about when you join a company?

Anytime Buddhist traditions have migrated from one geography to another, they’ve always morphed and adapted to the host culture. Chinese Zen is very different from Indian Buddhism. When meditation got to the West, it became psychologized, scientized, instrumentalized, and eventually commodified—though that didn’t happen until after the year 2000. At first, it was confined to the hospital clinic, with Jon Kabat-Zinn, as a therapeutic modality. Having the scientific community come into being with mindfulness is really the watershed moment. A Time magazine special issue in 2014, with a beautiful blonde blissing out, was the pivotal time when the mindfulness revolution really became mainstream.

What is it used for now?

It began with mindfulness-based stress reduction in the hospital clinic—a legitimate therapeutic method for chronic pain, anxiety, stress. Then psychotherapists began integrating it into their practice. But, after 2014, corporations became interested, particularly in Silicon Valley. The poster child was Google. Corporate mindfulness training took off. Now it’s A.I. companies—Sam Altman practices mindfulness. These programs are offered by H.R. departments or consultants who sell them to companies. After my book came out, Amazon got into the game—with those Amazon coffins in its warehouses, little booths where you go in and watch a little video about mindfulness, do a little two-minute practice, and then get back on the warehouse floor.

Why do you think these corporations were so interested?

It’s a form of psychopolitics—that’s a term from Byung-Chul Han. Neoliberal capitalism is trying to harness the psyche as a productive force. People are overworked and stressed, and it’s much easier to put the burden on the individual employee than to actually address the corporate causes of stress: structural issues, lack of job security, too many work hours. It’s easier to pathologize stress and view it as a maladaptive response to the environment. The benefit to corporations is that they can squeeze as much productivity out of the worker as possible by having them reduce their stress and then have less absenteeism, less burnout, less complaining.

The introduction of medical experts seems crucial—it gave this idea legitimacy among the management class who would ultimately get interested.

Medical and psychological professions function as a form of neoliberal discipline. We internalize that discipline ourselves. And it functions as what’s been called a disimagination machine—the problem and solution are inside our own heads, which forecloses the possibility of looking at structural change. Neoliberalism wants atomization, managing our own human capital. There’s no sense of solidarity or collective power or action with others. The problems are pathologized as individual problems, and then we get sold back solutions. Here’s a mindfulness app on your smartphone—three minutes and you’ll be fixed. Headspace, Calm—billion-dollar companies.

What has been stripped out? Someone could argue that mindfulness does work, it confers benefits. What’s the harm?

I got that question so many times. I’m not saying mindfulness has no therapeutic value. People need to manage their immediate distress. The problem is when it becomes the only solution offered, when it becomes a substitute for actually looking at what’s causing the distress in the first place.

The analogy I give is you have to take a painkiller if you have a broken leg. But if you don’t set the bone, you’ll feel better, but you’re not fixing the underlying problem. Even worse, the painkiller may numb you to such an extent that you’re still walking on the broken leg, making the injury worse.

That’s what’s happening with corporate mindfulness workplace programs. We’re numbing ourselves to intolerable conditions so we can keep functioning within them. And the whole framework is narcissistic—it’s all about me managing my reactions, me feeling better, me being more resilient. There’s never a question of whether the conditions themselves need to change, or whether I have any responsibility to other people who are suffering under the same conditions.

I spent a lot of my early twenties thinking about these ideas, working as a tree planter, reading Gary Snyder. The teacher I worked with—I think he trained as a monk—would always say that the whole point is to understand that everyone is there. You can’t give in to a type of spiritual vanity. So what’s been lost?

There’s a term I use: spiritualized-neutrality trap. It’s similar to spiritual bypassing, but it’s political bypassing. Mindfulness becomes a way of sidestepping the world’s pain rather than engaging with it.

What’s stripped out at its core—and this is the deepest core of the contemplative traditions—is a non-dual realization of wisdom, an experience of oneness. That is really the reason for engaging in contemplative practices. But it gets turned into an instrumentalized technique rather than a spiritual path for realization of unity with your neighbor, with nature, with the cosmos. We’re sidestepping all of that for the benefit of becoming productive, just feeling a little bit better—a palliative.

We’re not stripping away the ego—we’re feeding it. We’re stripping away the juice, the demand of these practices, which is really a commitment to go beyond self-interest.

Traditional Buddhism is not about social activism if you look at it—it’s about individual awakening. But, as the result of individual awakening, one becomes engaged with the world, because one doesn’t feel separate from the world. That’s what’s lost. The modern version just reinforces separation. It tells you that you’re a separate self who needs to manage your separate experience better.

There was a similar dynamic in the sixties and seventies Zen movements—a deep vanity, really. You’re perfecting yourself while everybody else doesn’t exist. I think about Gary Snyder, who I admire, but there’s something off about looking at an axe in the woods while the world is exploding. How do you convince people that the whole point is to understand that other beings exist?

That’s the challenge. Mindfulness is one factor of the Eightfold Path, and those other factors are extremely important.

In Buddhism, they talk about shamatha and vipassana. Shamatha is calming; you need a stable mind to do the deep investigation, which is vipassana—seeing clearly. You can’t see clearly if you’re bouncing around reacting to everything. So meditation is often associated with sitting and calming the breath. But that’s just a preliminary. Mindfulness takes that preliminary and glorifies it into the be-all and end-all.

McMindfulness says the problem is in your head, the solution is managing your mental ruminations. What’s left out is calling into question whether both the self and world are even what they appear to be. We just stay at the level of, How do I feel less stressed so I can be more productive? The narcissism is built into the very structure of the question.

There’s a lot left out besides that—the ethical dimensions.

What about the ethical dimensions?

It’s not very different from other religious traditions. One big summary is: do no harm, in whatever form that takes. There’s an elaborate schema—anger, lust, the whole list—finding ways to discern and regulate. There is self-regulation going on in the initial stages of spiritual development, and this is where calming does come into play. If you’re always reacting to things, clarity is not accessible. So calming the mind is quite important, and that’s where there’s overlap with mindfulness. But it’s all for a means to a different end.

You write that “a truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system” but “mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” What does that revolutionary movement look like?

I think it’s a revolution in consciousness first. Another way I’ve been thinking about mindfulness is as a modern form of social stoicism—having forbearance and accepting things we can’t change. The revolutionary nature of what I’m getting at is it’s a revolution in how we know. It’s a participatory knowing which transforms how we engage with what we think of as the world.

It’s not quietism, and it’s not anger-fuelled activism. What spiritual revolutionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., embodied was something different—action that flows from clarity, from intimacy. Jesus Christ was all about love. There was an intimacy rather than an opposition. But he also threw over the tables in the temple.

Justice and compassion aren’t just moral duties that we impose from the outside. They grow out of a revolutionary change in consciousness—a recognition of interbeing, radical interdependence. When you really see that, you act differently. Not because you should, but because you can’t help it.

Churches have historically provided that infrastructure, that communal support for social movements. Then we see this privatization, this depoliticizing—religion got quarantined away from the public sphere, reduced to a purely private matter. That’s where mindfulness fits snugly: “spiritual but not religious,” a way of coping for people who have lost trust in institutions. But it’s coping that keeps you isolated. It never builds anything.

How has the internet changed this? So much of mindfulness is on phones now. It’s not just Buddhism—people have TikTok pastors with hundreds of thousands of followers giving two-minute sermons, or A.I.-avatar gurus. My sense is that the reason for this disconnect—the loss of power that faith traditions and philosophies once had to influence progressive movements—is that so much of it is digital now. The idea that we exist together, the idea of collective responsibility, is taken away when everything is mediated through a screen.

Right. The platform just lends itself to it—so much monetary potential. There’s the irony that you turn to your smartphone, which is telling you not to be addicted to it, to do an app. It just reinforces atomization, isolation. Meditation becomes a neutral tool for managing your own mental states. They use language like compassion, but it’s self-compassion—don’t get mad at yourself. There’s no solidarity. Compassion and wisdom become free-floating signifiers, detached from any actual relationship to other people, masquerading as something profound.

How do people get back to a more socially engaged form of this?

How do we move beyond the dichotomous choice between activist rage and meditative detachment? That’s where we’re stuck.

I’ll be impractical. It requires revisiting lost traditions, serious refamiliarization with the deepest forms of non-dual wisdom, of whatever tradition: Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, or even secular. It doesn’t matter.

What I mean is a new vision of reality. Do we have one that accentuates our common humanity? Our participation with our common home? Ecology means home. Right now we have a spiritual vacuum where the human being is conceived of as just a fragment, an island defending our territory because we feel at risk as such fragile, atomized individuals. That’s the pathos of modern Western neoliberal culture. That’s what mindfulness reinforces.

What I’m calling for is a way of knowing that’s not just rational and separatist. It’s embodied. It’s heart-centered. A way of knowing that has an intimate sense of contact with being. And being is inclusive of all beings.

You can’t think your way into this. You have to live it. But you can’t live it until you ground yourself in it, until you discover and nurture it with other people. ♦

When Gregory K. Bovino was a boy, he saw a movie called “The Border,” a crime thriller about corruption among U.S. Border Patrol officers working in El Paso. The film, whose executive producer was Bovino’s great-uncle, Neil Hartley, arrived in theatres in 1982. Bovino was eleven. Years later, he would say that the film had inspired him to join Border Patrol. If that’s the case, it’s a little like entering the hospitality industry after watching “The Shining.”

“We all know what that movie was about,” Bovino said, in 2021, on an episode of a podcast produced by the Border Patrol Academy. By that point, Bovino was the chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, which covers a seventy-one-mile span of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Southern California. The film follows a Border Patrol agent, Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson), who gets drawn into a human-smuggling operation by his new partner, the venal and murderous Cat, played by Harvey Keitel. Decent and brooding in the style of a neo-Western leading man, Charlie is stunned by his colleagues’ brutal treatment of “wets,” the migrants whom they sometimes arrest, and sometimes hand over to a human trafficker.

The movie is, above all, about the moral compromise and human costs that come with immigration enforcement. But it is also a commentary on the mythic plenitude of American life; the film prods you into wondering whether that allure is illusory. What seems to have left an impression on Bovino, however, is the film’s unflattering portrayal of immigration officers, which he appears to have taken as an insult that demanded a response. “I thought maybe I’d get a little bit on the other side and take it back the other way,” he said on the podcast.

Today, the whole nation has seen what “taking it back the other way” apparently means. Bovino, who was “commander-at-large” of Border Patrol under President Trump, was recently dismissed by him as the head of the Administration’s immigration-enforcement effort in Minneapolis, after a civilian named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by border agents. (Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse, was killed around two weeks after Renee Nicole Good, another civilian in Minneapolis, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.) Like many others in the Trump Administration, Bovino defended Pretti’s killing, claiming that he had violently resisted arrest and had “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite videos suggesting otherwise. As during the 2021 podcast interview, Bovino defended Border Patrol to a public, and a press, that he did not believe understood or appreciated the job. “The victims are the Border Patrol agents,” he said, last month, on CNN.

“The Border” may be the closest we can come to understanding Bovino’s motivations, and the chaos he has engendered. The film is largely forgotten today, a minor effort awkwardly lodged between the grit of New Hollywood, on one side, and the schlocky flash-bang blockbusters of the eighties, on the other. But, along with “Borderline,” a film that premièred two years earlier, starring Charles Bronson as a Border Patrol officer who impersonates a migrant in order to hunt down a human smuggler, “The Border” is a foundational artifact that sheds light on how our culture—not just Bovino—has understood immigration.

“That’s unfortunate,” Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the producer of “The Border,” told me, after I mentioned that Bovino had been inspired by the film. Bronfman said his own inspiration had been a newspaper series about immigration that had run in the Los Angeles Times a few years before the movie came out. One article by the reporter Evan Maxwell, written during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, noted that the Administration had “shown an increasing sensitivity to the rights of illegal aliens.”

Bronfman hired Deric Washburn, who had co-written the screenplay for “The Deer Hunter”, to write the script. (Walon Green, who had written “The Wild Bunch,” was among the other writers who contributed.) “His remit was to try and dramatize the situation at the border, which I felt like nobody really knew about or understood,” Bronfman said, of Washburn. “I didn’t think people understood the nature of, and the desperation of, would-be immigrants. I also understood that the Border Patrol had a very difficult job to do. I asked Deric to try to imagine that into a story.”

Illegal immigration, as we understand it today, was only just becoming a political issue. After the Second World War, immigrants to the U.S. had mainly been from Europe. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act at a ceremony beneath the Statue of Liberty. The law, Johnson said, would “repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice” by lifting decades-old quotas that strongly favored white Europeans.

The year before, Johnson had—with much less fanfare—allowed for the expiration of the bracero program, a formal agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that allowed Mexican laborers, known as braceros, to enter the U.S. legally, on a temporary basis, to work in American agriculture. In the decades that followed, the economies of Sun Belt states exploded, while the so-called Mexican miracle collapsed into a debt crisis. Meanwhile, Americans’ demand for street drugs, especially cocaine, enabled the rise of violent drug cartels. In other words, incentives to cross the border only grew, whatever the laws said.

American politicians noticed. Carter’s leniency was met with a Republican backlash. In 1981, the Reagan Administration unveiled an immigration policy that made employing undocumented workers illegal. “We have lost control of our borders,” then U.S. Attorney General William French Smith said. “We have pursued unrealistic policies. We have failed to enforce our laws effectively.”

For all the scenes of jeeps raising dust in the desert and migrants wading through the Rio Grande, “The Border” is something of a two-hander. Charlie’s prevailing disgust with his fellow-officers, most of whom all but openly take part in a human-trafficking operation, is sharpened when a young migrant from Mexico, named Maria, has her infant stolen while they’re being held in a detention camp. Charlie sets out to retrieve the child, even though doing so will put him at odds with unscrupulous men on both sides of the border.

Elpidia Carrillo, the actress who plays Maria, comes from Michoacán, and lost several of her family members to violence, she recalled when we spoke earlier this month. Carrillo began acting at twelve, but “The Border” was her first American feature. She would have to hold her own against Nicholson, who played the deranged writer Jack Torrance, in “The Shining,” and who had won an Oscar, in 1976, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “I had no idea who he was,” Carrillo told me.

A peasant girl dressed in a canvas smock, Maria is mostly expressionless and mute, pulled to and fro like a dry leaf on a high wind. Aside from expressing her maternal instinct, she seems to have no will of her own, no capacity for sophisticated thought. Nor do the other migrants in the film stand out, the way even the most inconsequential white characters do. They are merely a mass of brown bodies, always in motion.

Carrillo took exception to this depiction, and told as much to the director, Tony Richardson, an Englishman. “The way you tell this story, this very humble woman, that’s just completely for you,’’ she recalled saying. “We’re not like that. We know our roots.”

“I was not happy to play that role,” she told me. Carrillo added that she didn’t think Bovino’s great-uncle, Hartley, liked her much. “He actually wanted another girl to play the role.”

Once, Carrillo said, Nicholson “playfully” tapped her buttocks in rehearsal. She said that she kicked him in return, and he lost his balance. (A representative for Nicholson did not respond to requests for comment.) When things settled down, Richardson approached. He told her to channel her rage about the role into her character. “That’s exactly who you are,” he told her. “You’re going to fight for your baby.”

In his posthumously published 1993 memoir, Richardson devotes several passages to Nicholson, whom he described as “meticulously prepared.” He lambasts Valerie Perrine, who played Charlie’s wife, Marcy, as “a difficult and needlessly bitchy and offensive woman to most of the people working around her.” (A representative for Perrine strongly disputed that characterization and said that “everybody who’s worked for her had high praise for her on sets” and that “she was very professional about her work.”) Carrillo is simply “an unknown Mexican actress,” in Richardson’s telling, whom he “found.”

Some of the most effective scenes in the film have nothing to do with the border. Charlie is at first working in Los Angeles, but Marcy persuades him to move to El Paso so that they can live in a two-family duplex with her high-school friend Savannah, who’s married to Cat. Soon enough, they are pulling into the driveway of the new house, in a bleak suburban subdivision wrested from the West Texas scrublands. Reunited, Marcy and Savannah perform a saucy cheerleading routine in front of their husbands, which ends with the promise of fellatio. Charlie laughs, but there is something like embarrassment, or unease, on his middle-aged, mustachioed face. Cat has no such reservations. “Charlie, I feel you and me have scored the best damn pussy in the whole state of Texas,” he informs his new colleague.

However awful Richardson thought that Perrine may have been on set, she perfectly conveys the cheerful despair of the classic American striver, always on the move, ever on the make. She buys a waterbed. She dreams of a television career (perhaps staying in Los Angeles would have been the better idea). Charlie grows furious about her spending. “No more is no more,” he says. She doesn’t understand, and so he hits her across the face.

These domestic sequences are bracketed with scenes on the border. In effect, the film seems to imply that the migrants are risking their lives for plastic-covered couches and daytime soap operas. Of course, it’s not that simple. They are escaping abject poverty and repressive regimes. Charlie, though, is trying to keep them out of a country that thoroughly repulses him.

“The Border” divided film critics. “It’s a solid, impressive movie,” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, adding that Carrillo “suggests a dark, adolescent Ingrid Bergman.” But, in the Times, Vincent Canby characterized the film as “an angry, brutal melodrama” in the “shape of a made-for-television movie.”

The film indeed ends in melodramatic fashion, with Nicholson killing Cat in a shoot-out. He retrieves Maria’s baby, who is unharmed, handing the child to her as they both stand ankle-deep in the Rio Grande. The movie was supposed to end even more violently; Richardson explained to Rolling Stone that he originally planned for Nicholson to blow up a Border Patrol headquarters, but preview audiences bristled. “It became too romantic,” Bronfman, the movie’s producer, said, of the final cut. “It wasn’t enough about the reality of the situation.”

Whatever Bovino took away from the film, it certainly wasn’t the unexpected benevolence of its ending; during the recent immigration raids in Minneapolis, he was heavily criticized for the decision to put Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old boy, into detention. “We will continue to take these bad people, bad things, off the streets,” Bovino said, at a press conference, afterward. (Ramos and his father were released from custody and returned to Minneapolis earlier this month.)

Ultimately, Richardson would acknowledge the film’s shortcomings in his book. He liked the new upbeat ending, but knew that the movie was missing something. “Perhaps the border is just too big and too living a situation to be contained in the form of any story,” he conceded. Bronfman voiced nearly the same sentiment many years later. “It’s difficult, in a film, to sometimes have as much nuance as you’d like,” he told me. “It wasn’t everything I had hoped it would be, but I felt like we did a pretty good job.”

It could be that the film’s lurid and relentless action—a fight in a strip club, car chases, a drunken party—vitiates any true moral force it could have had. And maybe that was the point. It is as if the scriptwriters, and Richardson, do not quite want to say what needs to be said. They pull their punches because, if the punch lands, their own hands will bleed.

Carrillo, for her part, would go on to star opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator,” and to work on many other films. She recently starred in “Solidarity,” a film about a garment worker in downtown Los Angeles. These days, she lives in Southern California. She told me that, despite her initial qualms, she is proud of “The Border,” and hardly sees it as an advertisement to sign up for U.S. Border Patrol. “I don’t see how people could misunderstand the movie right now,” she said. ♦